LONDON, April 18, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Replikins Ltd will reveal details on the availability of two completely synthetic vaccine candidates, both with long-term prevention goals and acute short-term blocking capacity. One of these vaccines targets H7N9 alone, the other for H7N9 plus the other common influenza strains. The company is exploring partnerships with established healthcare and pharmaceutical companies to aggressively commercialize the technology.

Because Replikins is leveraging proprietary software techniques to isolate targeted regions in the virus, combined with recent advances in manufacturing synthetic peptides, the company and its partners are able to provide rapid turnaround of vaccine candidates based on early data emerging from disease outbreaks. This approach stands in marked contrast to projections by other companies of delays of seven months or longer before vaccines can be made available, and makes it possible to consider effective public health responses to disease outbreaks while they are still at an early stage.

Replikins will provide details of the technology and is seeking partnerships at the BIO International Convention April 22nd-25th at its booth #3456, McCormick Place, Chicago.

The technique used to create Replikins' new synthetic vaccine candidates is similar to those the company used in manufacturing a successful Replikins H5N1 "bird flu" vaccine in chickens in a paper published in 2009. That vaccine was produced in 7 days, shipped freeze-dried, and administered via the respiratory tract. Significantly, in addition to stopping the virus in the chickens, excretion of the virus was completely prevented, thus potentially interfering with the build-up of virus reservoirs which encourage mutations.